<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>La Muerte Pálida (The Pale Death) by Lepak</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28152246">La Muerte Pálida (The Pale Death)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lepak/pseuds/Lepak'>Lepak</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Disco Elysium (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Brief reference to internalised homophobia, Gen, POV Second Person, References to Addiction, Ruby/Klaasje (briefly), Very brief reference to corporal punishment, but they're not the focus of this</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 00:21:24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,126</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28152246</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lepak/pseuds/Lepak</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The world hides you in her fog skirts. You row until you can no longer see land, till even its shadow has been swallowed and you’re drifting alone, the last person left alive in Elysium. Or perhaps the first ever made, floating in a wooden womb, amniotic fluid dewing on your thin coat. <br/>---<br/>The Paledriver reminisces.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>32</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>La Muerte Pálida (The Pale Death)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/coolant/gifts">coolant</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Inspired by this scene from the game:</p><p>Paledriver -- “I’ve only felt it in the distance. When I was a child…” She goes silent, her eyes close and her hands shake. “A child. Rowing on the lake.”<br/>Paledriver -- “*Hosianna…*” A sigh escapes her lips, then silence, as she stares  within herself.<br/>Empathy -- There is nothing more to do now. She’s far away.<br/>Conceptualization -- She is receding. In the clutches of some indescribable, scattered emotion. A child.</p><p>Big thanks to luminality for the title.</p><p>Written for the Disco Elysium Secret Santa</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><strong>//—</strong>lake in autumn and your oars dipping soundlessly into the water, the book you stole from your mother nestled next to your chest. When you slipped out the door she was still snoring in her chair, submerged by a bottle of cheap mezcal. She will beat you if she catches you. You haven’t been caught. Yet.</p><p>The world hides you in her fog skirts. You row until you can no longer see land, till even its shadow has been swallowed and you’re drifting alone, the last person left alive in Elysium. Or perhaps the first ever made, floating in a wooden womb, amniotic fluid dewing on your thin coat. </p><p>You stow your oars, pulling them dripping into the boat. You look out. Your eyes don’t find purchase on the horizon, you hear nothing except the lapping water and your own ragged breaths. A part of you wants to keep rowing, to forge onwards into nothing, to let nothing expand before and behind you and grind you away. Until you’re nothing but momentum, a vector arcing through space.</p><p>This part of you should scare you. It doesn’t. <em> That </em>is what scares you.</p><p>It is just light enough to read by. You blow on your chapped fingers and rub warmth back into them, then take out the book. It’s a dog-eared paperback, spine cracked in half, but the way the couple on the cover hold each other makes your stomach flutter in a way you don’t quite understand. The woman has flung her head back, dark hair cascading in waves, and her pale arms clutch her lover’s naked back. He dips his head to nuzzle her neck, and she<strong>—//</strong></p><p><strong>//—</strong>leans into your lighter flame, the end of her cigarette glowing as she fills her lungs. Her eyelashes are long, matted with black mascara, and for the tenth time since you’ve met she reminds you of Eva Deshoras in <em> The Samaran Stranger</em>, a femme fatale tottering into Martinaise with nothing but a silver jumpsuit and secrets she wants to forget.</p><p><em> You </em> want to kiss her. She may let you, tonight.</p><p>“Thanks,” she says, sweet smoke trailing from her lips. You’re on the roof of the Whirling, watching the 8/81 glow in the distance, the great electric spine of Jamrock. It thrums with motor carriages even this late at night.</p><p>“So your girl,” she says in her honeyed rasp, “what was she like?”</p><p>You light your own cigarette. “The smartest person I’d ever known. Give her a machine or engine and by the end of the day she’d have taken it apart and put it back together.”</p><p>“Clever hands.”</p><p>“Fingers too.” You shoot her your best grin.</p><p>She rewards you with a smile. “Why’d you break up?”</p><p>“She got a job. Manning a repeater station out in the pale. It paid enough to move her family to a nice house in Faubourg and send her sister to the Academy. But we both knew that no one comes back from a job like that. So we held a funeral for her, invited all our friends, gave eulogies, got trashed, the works.” You suck your cigarette down. “We ended things that night. It was easier that way.”</p><p>“Really?”</p><p>“Better than watching her die. Overwritten one memory at a time.”</p><p>You smoke together in silence. Her pale eyes watch the yellow and orange car lights twinkling on the motorway. “I wonder what that feels like,” she says quietly.</p><p>Like something out of a romance flick, it begins to snow. You brush snowflakes from her hair and tuck a blonde lock behind her ear. She turns to face you and you lean in and<strong>—//</strong></p><p><strong>//—</strong>the most beautiful man you know smoulders on the screen. His jawline is chiselled granite, the corners of his lips are curled upwards, coaxing a dimple from a stubbled cheek. You’ve seen this movie dozens of times. Other drivers blow their pay in gambling halls and brothels, but you prefer to spend yours in cinemas all over Mesque. It’s how you unwind after your deliveries. Tickets are cheap, even after factoring in the cost of a box of sugared peanuts. </p><p>You’re also saving for a new truck. The kind with special rollers on the wheels which connect to the floors of airships. Every driver tells you, the <em> real </em> money is in the routes through the pale, and it’s a good enough explanation when your friends ask why you'd want to expose yourself to irradiation and madness. It’s a good enough explanation to yourself too. When you lie awake at night.</p><p>Violins swell. Gabriel Buenguerro speaks again, “You are my breath. For as long as I live.” </p><p>Two schoolgirls sitting in front of you clutch each other and sob. You know all his lines by heart. He and Renata Moreno will spend a night of passion in each others’ arms, and in thirty minutes his ribcage will shatter in a pistol duel, blood blotting his white shirt in a brilliant red bullseye. </p><p>He will fall to the earth. Renata will scream and struggle, prevented from holding her beloved by her aristocrat father. The camera will zoom into Gabriel’s face as he gasps at the callous sky, and right at the moment of death, before the credits roll, something will stain the corners of his eyes. Joy.</p><p>It’s your favourite moment. It draws you back to these stuffy fire traps, the soft peanuts, the seats damp from their previous occupant’s sweat. You recognise it. This joy. The way you would yourself in an old photo, your adult face peeking through your child’s one. There is that part of you which craves it.</p><p>You sit in your warm seat, beside your craving. On the screen, made in light, Gabriel smiles and opens<strong>—//</strong></p><p><strong>//—</strong>the cork and you lift the bottle to your lips. Wine floods over your tongue. It’s awful, thin and overly-tannic, but you swallow anyway and take another mouthful.</p><p>Someone bangs your trailer door. “Call time was three hours ago!” Director Friedeberg bellows. “Every minute you spend in there costs us five thousand reál!” There’s more banging. You ignore him. Take another swig. Herr Director screams and threatens and finally begs you to please, <em> please </em> get on set, do the fucking job we hired you for.</p><p>You reach for another bottle. Slump in your chair. They can’t make the movie without you, your face is plastered on billboards all over Mesque, larger than houses. And you’re sick of pretending to be in love with Renata and the dozen other actresses and dancers the studio has arranged for you to be seen in public with, each of them beautiful, charming, and smitten with you. You’re sick of the sneaking, of bundling yourself into the boot of a motor carriage at three in the morning, of flinching in the flash of the paparazzi, of making sure your blinds are down and curtains drawn before you can hold your lover’s hand. You’re sick of everything. You’re sick<strong>—//</strong></p><p><strong>//—</strong>and a hand clasps your shoulder. “First time, love?” a longhaulsman says in his Vespertine accent. He smiles at you kindly.</p><p>You swallow and nod, trying not to spew your breakfast onto his checked shirt.</p><p>He nods back. “Nerves is normal.” He rummages in his vest pockets and offers you a paper roll of peppermints. “Here, these’ll help.”</p><p>You take one and crunch it between your molars like a bone, and you feel a little better. When you try to return the others, the longhaulsman waves you off. </p><p>“Keep ‘em, I’ve plenty.” He jerks his head towards a small figure standing in the maw of the airship, waving a yellow flag. “Checks are done. We’d best drive in.”</p><p>“Thanks,” you say, as you climb into your cabs. “See you in Graad.”</p><p>He winks at you. “Don’t lose yourself, love.”</p><p>Trucks trundle into the hold of the airship, their rollers clicking. You ease yours in, stopping behind Sr. Vespertine and pulling your handbrake. When the last truck has parked, the ramp lifts up, alarms blaring, and then with a dull <em> clang </em> you’re entombed. Red light throbs in the hold, brightening and darkening in a rhythm that’s calibrated to relax the eyes and brain.</p><p>You breathe in time with it. It’s best not to enter the pale in an agitated state.</p><p>The airship lurches with your stomach. You pop two peppermints in your mouth, clacking them against your teeth. A roar rattles your cab windows as the turbines rev, and you feel the ground beneath you move, and then some giant unseen hand slams into your chest and pins you to your seat and you’re <em>flying</em><strong>—//</strong></p><p><strong>//—</strong>at the pack of Coalition bombers, diving like a skua. They haven’t spotted you, won’t hear you coming because you’ve turned your engine off. Your hand is steady, your mind sharp and clear, and as the airships loom towards you, gleaming forget-me-not blue, you open fire.</p><p>One bomber drops out of the sky, engine aflame, pinwheeling to the sea. The other two peel away and you punch through their formation, your rotors whirring back to life. You press your assault, harrying your enemies’ bulkier, slower airships. Another breaks apart as your bullets rake its wings, and you soar into the air, your blood singing. You’ll break through today, repel their offence. The black-and-whites will expel these bluebottles. The Revolution marches on. Revachol will be<strong>—//</strong></p><p><strong>//—</strong>nothing and no one can persuade you to stop. You sign up for the longest and most dangerous routes: the Graad-Katla Magistral, out to Lomonossov's Land, the approach through Udachnaya Zemlya. The other drivers begin to treat you differently, stepping back to let you pass through doorways and leaving the lot next to your truck clear.</p><p>You’ve gained a reputation. You don’t care.</p><p>At your next mandatory check up, a young doctor declares that you’ve been exposed to inadvisable levels of pale radiation and orders you to take the rest of the year off. “Intra-isolary deliveries only." </p><p>You hate his weak jaw and his watery eyes. So you refuse.</p><p>A disagreement occurs. He calls his superior in, jabbing the charts which track your vital statistics, arguing why you should be confined to the earth. The senior doctor glances at you, fine wrinkles creasing her forehead and cheeks like bark.</p><p>She taps the second-last line of the eye chart, pinned to the wall opposite you. “Read this.”</p><p>You do so. Flawlessly and without hesitation.</p><p>“Clear her for work,” she says to the young doctor.</p><p>He blinks. “But her signs—”</p><p>“Do you want to take her deliveries?” she snaps. “All we do is determine if she’s fit to drive. What she does after is none of our business.”</p><p>You’re in the belly of an airship that afternoon with a trailer full of FALN shoes bound for Samara. You need this, you want this, it’s better than drugs, than sex. You strap yourself into your seat, feeding your craving with quiet anticipation. You want<strong>—//</strong></p><p><strong>//—</strong>amber sunset dripping through the arched windows. Diamonds glitter on your fingers, around your wrists, at your neck. Roses bloom in heavy pots, their perfume cloying.</p><p>Gabriel takes your hand and presses his lips to your knuckles. “Marquesa Amalia, you are <em> ravishing</em>,” he purrs. And he leads you down the grand stairwell, lords and ladies flocking to you like bright tropical birds. </p><p>You dance. Whirling through partners, a new arm hooked around your waist with every new song. A grand chandelier glows above you, its glass branches newly wired with bulbs and electric light. A shattered captive sun. </p><p>The song ends. You bow to your partner, and spin around to face Gabriel. His cheek dimples, and he caresses your hip, and you’ve never loved<strong>—//</strong></p><p><strong>//—</strong>your body is trapped in this blasted blockade, but you are elsewhere. Roaming through memory, yours and others’ and nobody’s, gifts from the pale. You no longer sleep. Only dream.</p><p>Curious things are happening in Martinaise. Dockworkers chant slogans and raise their homemade signs. Meat that was a man ripens on a tree. A void wrapped in the shell of a police officer buzzes in your ear about drug trafficking. You tell him about the Motorway South instead. Of erasure and oblivion. A look creeps into his bloodshot eyes, one which chimes with yours, your insatiable craving. But where he failed—emptying himself onto the street, meltwater running through dirty snow—you gorged yourself. Swallowing greedily, filling your mouth again and again.</p><p>He was weak. You are <em> radiant</em>.</p><p>The other police officer frowns and gently shepherds the void away. You watch them interview the greasy so-called poet. Smoke floods your lungs. You’ve been here for too long. You lean against your cab, its metal skin chilling yours, and you turn your face to the cold sun and close your eyes and there is a<strong>—//</strong></p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>